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I’m Just No Good at Rhyming

by Chris Harris, Illustrated by Lane Smith
First sentence: “A door.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: Oh, it’s SO silly. And no potty humor. It will be in the poetry section of the bookstore.
Release date: September 26, 2017

I loved Shel Silverstein’s poems when I was a kid. I would read Where the Sidewalk Ends over and over, giggling at all the silliness. And when my kids were little, I discovered Jack Prelutsky, with much the same result for them: we loved the ridiculous poems.

This book is this generations Silverstein and Prelutsky. I know that’s a HUGE statement to make, but that’s what it reminded me of. I picked it up late one night, not knowing what to expect. And ended up not only giggling madly, but sharing with both A and K all my favorite poems. And there were a lot of poems to share. From the “Alphabet Book (By the Laziest Artist in the World)” to (one of my personal favorites) “The Duel” and “Re-Verse” and “Trapped!” and “L-O-V-E” and and… it was full of things to giggle over and share.

There were some sweet moments, too, like Harris’s observations on grownups in “Grown-ups Are Better (I)”, where he ends ” Grown-ups are better at most stuff, you see,/From tying a shoelace to chopping a tree./But children are gooder and grown-ups are badder/At just about all things that matter.” Or the (almost) final poem “Let’s Meet Right Here in Twenty-Five Years”. And Lane Smith’s illustrations were perfect for this. Again, equal parts silly and ridiculous, but with a dash of wink-wink on the side.